Not disconfirmable – there’s no explanation of how they are made that can be analyzed

Not revisited – because there is no way to “edit” them

This prompts two thoughts. The first is that the kind of technology David Ullman has been working on (Accord, reviewed here) is worth considering for this kind of collaborative decision making. A decision supported by Accord would be transparent – you could see why you decided the way you did – as well as editable over time so that new data, or new options, could be integrated and evaluated.

The second is that these same characteristics are true of decision made by your front line staff when they interact with your customers. They often can’t explain them, not that anyone really asks, and they tend not to be amendable because the customer moves on afterward, happy or not. There is no way to analyze the thought process of these staff and so no way to revisit them to devise a better approach in the future. And these issues are more serious because we are not talking about the executive team (complete with lots of experience, assistants and analysts, deep business understanding etc) but about your least experienced, lowest paid staff.

In this second scenario one effective approach is to use Decision Management to put the decision making into your systems – into Decision Services that support your systems to be precise. Embedding the policies, regulations and best practices that you want applied as rules and using the data you have to drive analytic models with simply outputs (scores, for instance) gives better decisions to the front-line while ensuring transparency and an ability to analyze your decisions and learn what works so that you can constantly improve.

So figure out how to help your executives and managers collaborate around decisions effectively and use Decision Management to ensure you know what’s going on at the front line.